Not What Stanford White Envisioned, but Notable

NEO- AND NOT New York Universitys neo-Classical Bronx campus about 1905 and the buildings now. Credit
Library of Congress, top, and Susan Farley for The New York Times

FALL is a good time to visit the grounds of Bronx Community College at 180th Street and University Avenue, overlooking the Harlem River. The red and orange leaves skitter over the lawns and walkways, just as they must have when it opened in 1894 as New York University’s uptown campus.

Henry MacCracken, appointed chancellor in 1891, believed that undergraduate life needed sports, fraternities and the open air — certainly not ingredients to be found in the center of a city. He hired Stanford White to create a plan for the 40-acre site, which many people today know as the location of the colonnaded Hall of Fame for Great Americans.

Chancellor MacCracken told The New York Times in 1895 that he wanted the place to look like “the American ideal of a college,” far removed from the factories and tenements spreading around the Washington Square campus of N.Y.U., founded in 1831.

Early drawings show the Bronx campus with a great academic quadrangle of neo-Classical buildings running eastward from the cliffs over the Harlem River to a dormitory complex at University Avenue.

White worked in a delicate palette: limestone with a hypnotic mix of orange-, straw- and gold-colored Roman brick. What was soon called the University Heights campus opened in the fall of 1894, and only a year later Harper’s Weekly observed that “within less than a year the College Quadrangle has attained the appearance of an old-time seat of learning, with several stately buildings already erected.”

By 1900, these included Gould Hall, a dormitory fronting on University Avenue, and, overlooking the river, the Hall of Languages, Havemeyer Laboratory and Gould Memorial Library, with its huge rotunda.

In “New York University and the City” (Rutgers University Press, 1997), Thomas J. Frusciano and Marilyn H. Pettit wrote that by the 1920s, the University Heights campus had become “a serious financial drain on the university” and paled in comparison with the vibrant and unabashedly urban Washington Square campus.

Photo

In the 1960s, Meister Hall by Marcel Breuer was added. N.Y.U. sold the site in 1973, and it is now Bronx Community College.Credit
Susan Farley for The New York Times

A few more buildings were added to White’s original handful, like the Alumni Gymnasium of 1931, designed by Fiske Kimball with a Southern California air, and the chunky Bliss Hall of 1936, which an unknown architect gave a speckled but not unpleasing appearance in homage to White’s variegated brick.

In 1953, Eggers & Higgins designed a utilitarian buff-brick student center, and stuck it in the middle of the great open sweep between the dormitory on the east and the Gould Library and other Stanford White buildings on the west. What the original designers had conceived as a long, open vista was chopped in half by a structure completely devoid of charm — not a black hole, but a beige one.

In the 1960s, Marcel Breuer revived the sense of real architecture at the University Heights campus, even though his buildings were starkly modern. Meister Hall, Colston Hall and other works carry his trademark brutal concrete look, but they also incorporate straw-colored brick — an uncharacteristic nod to the past.

In 1973, N.Y.U. sold its Bronx campus to New York State for $62 million. The college’s uptown idyll had been losing money for years, especially as the Bronx declined. Bronx Community College moved in, and little has been built since.

But that may be changing. The college has hired Robert A. M. Stern Architects to erect a new library and classroom building on the north side of the de facto quadrangle demanded by the Eggers & Higgins building. This will close the fourth side of this large open space and may have a positive result. Alternatively, it might add even more to the frazzled, random quality of what started as a vision of Classical order.

A walk through the campus today is both disorienting and rewarding. On the eastern end, the old Gould dormitory, now classrooms and offices, is exquisitely crafted, especially the remarkable fluted pilasters made of specially molded brick. The Breuer buildings, although unfashionable now, are singularly complex, with details like stubby projecting sun shields and delicate brickwork struggling against their gawky, somewhat threatening facades.

The 1890s buildings overlooking the Harlem Valley sparkle in their soft orange and golden hues, each one a little gem, smaller and far more nuanced than Columbia University’s academic buildings.

It is a welcome surprise that Bronx Community College still uses many of the names associated with its N.Y.U. past. What administrator would not be tempted to rename Gould or Philosophy Hall after a well-connected politician?

Best of all, Bronx Community College has made an obvious effort to treat its campus with tact. New gateways and walls are in brick approximating White’s. Most of the older buildings have been treated thoughtfully, and many N.Y.U. memorials and plaques, now poignantly out of place, have been left intact.

E-mail: streetscapes@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on , on page RE9 of the New York edition with the headline: Not What Stanford White Envisioned, but Notable. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe